DONETSK, Ukraine // A team of international police officers was forced to cancel their visit to the crash site of the Malaysian plane in eastern Ukraine on Sunday following reports of fighting in the area.
Alexander Hug, the deputy head of a monitoring team from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said it was too dangerous for the unarmed officers to travel to the site from its current location in the rebel-held city of Donetsk.
Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was shot down with a surface-to-air missile over a part of eastern Ukraine controlled by pro-Russian separatists on July 17, killing all 298 people on board.
US and Ukrainian officials say it was shot down by a missile from rebel territory, most likely by mistake.
While it was not immediately clear where precisely clashes had broken out, a Ukrainian defence official said that government forces are now undertaking efforts to clear the areas around the Boeing 777 crash site from separatist rebels.
Mr Hug said the police mission, which is comprised of officers from the Netherlands and Australia, will reconsider resuming operations if security improves.
“We continue to reassess the situation continuously and we will start to redeploy tomorrow morning back to the site if the situation changes,” Mr Hug said.
Australian prime minister Tony Abbott had said earlier Sunday that unarmed Australian police would be sent to the crash site as part of a Dutch-led police force to secure the area and help recover victims’ remains.
Concerns about the integrity of the site were raised again on Saturday when a couple that had flown from their home in Perth, Australia, visited the wreckage-strewn fields outside the village of Hrabove. They even sat down on part of the debris.
Flights from Ukraine to the Netherlands have taken 227 coffins containing victims of the plane disaster. Officials say the exact number of people held in the coffins still needs to be determined by forensic experts in the Netherlands.
Ukraine’s National Security Council spokesman Andrei Lysenko said that Ukrainian troops were engaging rebels in fighting at several locations on Sunday, including near the town of Debaltseve, which is 25 kilometres northwest of the crash site.
There was also fighting on the outskirts of Horlivka, one of the separatists’ key strongholds, Mr Lysenko said.
Mr Lysenko said more than 20 rebel fighters were killed and eight of their armoured vehicles destroyed during fighting in Horlivka. One government soldier has been killed over the previous day’s fighting, he said.
Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported on Sunday that a column of Ukrainian armoured personnel carriers, trucks and tanks had entered the town of Shakhtarsk, 15 kilometres west of the site of the crash.
Shakhtarsk is a strategic town in the area. By controlling the town, the Ukrainian army would be cutting off the regional capital, Donetsk, from the highway leading to the Russian border.
The Malaysia Airlines disaster prompted some expectation in the West that Russia would scale back its involvement in the uprising in Ukraine’s east, but the opposite seems to be the case.
Ten days after the plane crashed, Russia launched artillery attacks from its soil into Ukraine on Friday. The United States also said it has seen powerful rocket systems moving closer to the Ukraine border.
* Associated Press